home automation

After the removal of our Raspberry Pi based home data logger and the installation of the Mosquitto MQTT and Home Assistant Data Logging system in March this year we have not been able to monitor the solar hot water pump...

Over the past few months Andrew has been working on a new circuit for a custom home alarm system to replace our current hardwired commercial alarm.
For the display panel on the new alarm we are going to be using a...

We have removed the Raspberry Pi based data logger from our home and moved the logging hardware and new software to the Gigabit Internet Gateway Network PC which we installed in December 2017.
The old Raspberry Pi...

This code example shows how you can use C# in either a Windows application or asp.net website to retrieve data from the Nest API to show information for your Nest Thermostat or Nest Smoke Alarms.
Before starting to write...

Following from our home network upgrade in August 2017 we have been trying to find a way to add global adblocking for the computers, tablets and phones connected to our network and to run additional software.
We had...

A few weeks ago, we purchased a tp-link LB130 smart bulb to use with the Home Assistant software we had been trying on the Raspberry Pi. The support for the bulb in the Home Assistant software was limited and so Andrew...

The home network installation for our computers was first setup using 10BASE2 coax connections when we only had 2 computers and one was connected to the internet via a modem. Since then we have upgraded to using first...

Since updating our home solar data logging system to the Raspberry Pi Solar Data Logger Version 2 in November 2015 we planned to add additional indoor and outdoor sensors to the system.
We ordered additional...

In a previous blog post we wrote about our new mains energy monitoring system which reads the values from our electric and gas meters and stores them in an online database. The gas reading was done using a reed...

In November of last year we finished work on our Raspberry Pi based solar data logger, a part of our ongoing smart home project that we have been working on for several years now. The solar logger monitors all of...